Trouble handling Photos

[whimsicalseal]

I got a 2018 16/512 MBA recently. Performance has been ok generally but when I have the photos app open, and not even asking it to process any commands, it drives my fans wild and uses between 50 and 80% of my CPU in activity monitor. Kind of disappointing given how marketing touts the efficiency of apples built-in apps. Is there something wrong here or is this just the MBA's limitations?

 

[DeltaMac]

I don't use Photos much, so I launched Photos.
Activity Monitor showed a large spike in CPU, Photos was using 195% CPU for about 20 seconds (2 cores, like your Air, so CPU can be normal above 100%), then dropped off to almost nothing (less than 4%, I think)

If you just let Photos sit idle, but open, does the CPU then drop off to some lower level?
(My Photos library is relatively small, a bit more than 5 GB total size, so possibly that's related?)

 

[whimsicalseal]

It keeps fluctuating from like 45-90, after about 25 mins now during which i just deleted a few photos. Some other posts suggests it may be scanning all my photos for facial recognition, so it will get lighter once its processed the backlog. Shame this feature can't be switched off or handled in a less crippling way by the system

 

[bcaslis]

When I first open Photos I get a spike to about 60% but within 5 - 10 seconds it goes down to about 3%. How many photos do you have and have you used Photos before on the MBA?

 

[whimsicalseal]

about 20,000. This is the second time im opening the app - first one i let it rebuild the databases after the data migration from my old ssd.

 

[DeltaMac]

I would do a couple of steps:
Download and install the current macOS combo updater.
Rebuild the spotlight database.
After disabling, or uninstalling the Eset antivirus, Launch your Photos app.
Let it sit idle for some period of time. The Spotlight database, in my experience, can take an hour or two to rebuild. I have no idea how long it might take for the Photos library to be fully optimized, but I don't think it would be completely out of whack to take 4 or 5 hours for only 20,000 pictures.

Do an NVRAM reset.
If all that doesn't help in any significant way - I would boot to a macOS installer, and reinstall the system. Won't hurt anything, and might help in some way. (Who knows? You might have had some kind of wierdness creep into your system when you migrated from your old system.) A macOS reinstall should then act as a sort of repair install of the system. Has worked for that a couple of times in the past few years - but then I "mistreat" my system with a frequent install/uninstall for testing a variety of software, and it acts a little petulant for me occasionally. A reinstall is just my method of getting my system back in control. )
If you must have an antivirus running on your system, wait until after you do whatever other system maintenance you might do, before your re-enable your AV.

 

[whimsicalseal]

Thanks a lot - I'll see which of those steps cracks it.

 

[icloudUser]

about 20,000. This is the second time im opening the app - first one i let it rebuild the databases after the data migration from my old ssd.

About Mac --> Storage - whats the storage it shows for photos on your MBA?

Also are you using optimize storage setting on your MBA? that might help with the CPU usage.

I have about 15K photos but with optimize storage turned ON. The storage used by photos has been a mystery for me in so far as About Mac shows 5GB but if use Disk Inventory X or similar it shows my photo lib is 20G !!